The first version of the Google Go programming language was released this week, which Google says will "provide a stable foundation for creating reliable products, projects, and publications". Do you think Google Go has a chance at succeeding as a programming language? Share your thoughts below. Why Go ? Google believes old programming languages have become too difficult and it's even more difficult to choose a language that supports efficient compilation, execution, or ease of programming. Go wants to resolve this by combining the ease of programming a language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language by keeping the support for networked and multicore computing. According to Google, Go should be fast and the execution of a program should be a few seconds on a single computer, at the most. It was a hard task for Google because it "required addressing a number of linguistic issues, an expressive but lightweight type system, concurrency and garbage collection, rigid dependency specification and so on". Because there are no forward declarations and no header files, everything is declared exactly once. This reduces typing time, clutter and complexity because now the initialization is expressive, automatic and easy to use. Go introduces Go fix, which is meant to automate the process of bringing programs up to the Go 1 standard and go command, a program for fetching, building, installing and maintaining Go code. This further "eliminates the need for Makefiles to write Go code because it uses the go program source itself to derive the build instructions. No more build scripts". Is Go the programming language of the future ? This is difficult to answer since this is the first stable version of this new programming language. Google is known for starting projects and abandoning them in time, but Go seems to be a more serious challenge for them. The Go 1 version if off to a good start, because it's different from other programming languages and it's fast and efficient. For programmers, being efficient and fast is the main goal when choosing a programming language. If Google continues to invest their efforts into building a stable, efficient and fast programming language, programmers will be tempted to adopt it. To be honest, as an asp.net programmer, I would give Google Go a try in the future. Google Go is an open source programming language and is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows. To get started with Go, you should access their website, golang.org.